


The Language of Mountains

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: The Mountain - Carter & Grammar (Song)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-29
Updated: 2010-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world speaks a language, and that language is mountains, and one mountain is silent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Language of Mountains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



In the Haltfoot Mountains they tell a story of the convocations of earth and metal, of the tiger magicians and ironsmiths and river goddesses whose veins bleed dew. Every mountain has its priest save one. The priests write their names in the ink of ice and the blood of bears, the priests whisper their names to the caverns with their listening albino lizards, the priests whittle their names into the oldest and most secret, the wisest and most sacred of trees.

Outside the Haltfoot Mountains they say many things of mountains, that they are the bones of soldiers from the oldest of wars, or that they imprison the tombs of warrior queens, so their swords might never rise up again in some forbidden vengeance for some forgotten slight. They say that mountains are really people who have fallen asleep while the earth clothes them in ever more elaborate blankets of stone, or that they were built as upwards-aspiring altars to gods who live in the crevices of the starry sky. They worship at the mountains' feet and meditate upon the mountains' shoulders. And all of them are wrong.

Mountains are the slow-changing symbols of the earth's own writing. If you listen over the creaking aeons, you can hear this one speak a syllable of iron black and cold and waiting to be forged into swords that cut the wind and chalices that hold the hearts of traitor poets. If you wind your way through the labyrinth forests with their finery of winter berries and jewel-eyed foxes, you can hear that one murmur an echo of the void's first exultant breath, and stamp it across your soul and in the depths of your smile. If you can live forever--and every traveler lives forever in the road's memory--you can trace every bleak precipice and lie in the shadows of the high rocks, you can dye your eyes with the colors of the brave lupines and learn to spell the exigencies of your existence in the earth's firstborn language, before there were cities and silver coins and sin.

Once upon a road there was a traveler, and that traveler was me. Once upon a road I wound a Möbius ribbon around the stirring continents with foot and fevered map, and in all the halls of the earth's great silences I heard the greatest silence of all: the mountain that had no priest, the mountain that had no name, the mountain that refused to yield itself to the earth's dense writings.

There is a saying in the Haltfoot Mountains that every heart has a hole in its center, that every mirror has a mouth in its depths. I walked through mirrors to find the mouth and ask it for its secrets in inverted ravings. The mirrors had stories for me of dying empresses who hid their jade seals and jagged scepters in their silver throats, of wide-eyed rooms that were made of mirrors and that were never permitted to see the human light of candle or flashlight lest they learn to speak to human desires. But none of the mirrors could tell me where to find the one mountain's name. I learned to sing--oh how I learned to sing--in the languages of bird and broken heart and breathless delight, and I courted the wise and the foolish, the lovers of sun-bright and the listeners of moon-tide. Some cried out in the moment of rapture and others cast me forth. But none of them could show me any fault line in their heart that I did not already have in my own.

For a while I laired in the world's libraries, which are sometimes to be found in the nests of hibernating mice or graffiti scratched upon discarded bottle caps by crows, and sometimes smeared in succulent jelly upon fresh-baked bagels. I indexed them diagonally and I indexed them in spirals and spelled out their most revered tomes of riddles and polyglot aphorisms, and they had nothing for me.

When I had traveled all the countries of the present and learned their languages, when I realized that the name I sought was to be found in none of them, I journeyed into the countries of the past. Sometimes I lingered in drowned cities, catching sea foam with my fingers and shaping them into funeral poems for bones that had become homes to bright darting fish and undulating ropes of kelp. Sometimes I wagered my voice on a duel in a wine-house where all the vintages smelled like candied flower-buds and divine rain, and sometimes I won back what I lost. I counseled queens who needed no counseling, and I stepped fleetly across the world when scholar-priests called for me to be ritually beheaded. And even then, I spoke words of honey and amber and delicious autumn to quiet the hungry ancestors they sought to placate.

Then I traveled into all the countries of the future. In some of them the world had translated itself into words of fire and ash and curdled radiation, eyeless things scurrying in the cracked tunnels that humankind had left for them. In some of them the world had turned itself into a single gleaming sphere of ice, beautiful and brittle and perfectly flawed. Great ships like silver needles pierced the canopy of sky, and most of them never came back. I rode on their backs and left scars like traceries of fractal dreams, and to return to the earth I knew, I slipped inside a scattering of light and slept to the lullaby of entropy ever swelling. There, in the cradle of oblivion, I learned how to speak the mountain I sought.

Once upon a road there will be a traveler, and that traveler is you. Mountains express settled places, have a fixity of purpose rooted in space and time and their woven prophecies. They are not a language of travelers, except this one, this one of all the mountains, is. Someday you, too, will step upon a road and into the mouth of a waiting mirror, and you will knit yourself into the mountain's name, and we will fill the holes in each other's hearts.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! May the year bring you splendor and beauty and humor and grace.


End file.
